AI saddles CIOs with new make-or-break expectations

CIOs and other IT leaders are experiencing a make-or-break moment as they face major new expectations in their roles, including the ability to lead change and build AI-ready teams.

IT leadership experts have been talking for years about the need for CIOs to focus on business results, in addition to providing technical expertise and keeping IT systems running. Those expectations remain, with 79% of IT leaders surveyed by Deloitte listing driving business outcomes as their top priority, a change from back-office upkeep to creating enterprise value.

But the 2026 Global Leadership Technology Study from Deloitte, based on surveys of more than 660 senior IT executives, finds new and expanding expectations for CIOs and other IT leaders, including AI and data fluency, change leadership capabilities, and the ability to build AI teams.

To fulfill those growing expectations, IT leaders also face significant headwinds. While 81% of those surveyed say they’re confident in their organization’s ability to deploy and govern AI, 75% also believe their operating models and processes must change within the next 12 to 18 months to drive greater value.

The numbers suggest that CIO ambitions for AI are outpacing capabilities, while they will increasingly be judged on their ability to drive business transformation and successful AI initiatives, says Anjali Shaikh, managing director of Deloitte Consulting and leader of the Deloitte global CIO and US tech executive programs.

“AI is such a CEO- and board-strategic priority,” she says. “They’re looking at the CIO to really help think about everything across the board, from process to talent implications, operating models, and governance risk.”

Shortage of AI experts

Building expert AI teams may be one of the most difficult expectations to meet. About a quarter of IT leaders in Deloitte’s survey named a shortage of skilled talent as a top challenge, just behind data quality and security and privacy concerns. Shaikh was surprised that the percentage of IT leaders concerned about a skills gap was as low as it was. For CIO.com’s 2026 State of the CIO survey, 40% of IT leaders identified a lack of in-house talent as their top challenge in implementing AI strategies during the past year.

Shaikh advises CIOs to look for AI expertise everywhere they can, whether it’s hiring new employees with AI experience, retraining current employees to build AI skills, or partnering with vendors and other providers to bring in outside experts. CIOs should also strengthen relationships with their organizations’ chief HR officers to fill AI needs, she recommends.

IT leaders are now expected to both build AI-ready teams and lead their organizations through the changes needed to embrace AI, Shaikh notes.

“The limiting factor increasingly isn’t whether people are using the technology, it’s shifting from hiring AI specialists to building AI-ready organizations, and I am seeing more and more CIOs get moved into the conversation,” she says. “How are you going to uplevel the organization’s AI fluency?”

Technical expertise is not enough to be a technology leader today, Shaikh says.

“What separates leading organizations and leading CIOs is, can you put a team together that can understand how to redesign work, how to rethink decision-making, and understand what a digital workforce and human workforce looks like together?” she adds.

Evolution always

The CIO’s role is one of constant evolution, adds Matt Ausman, CIO at scanning technology provider Zebra Technologies.

“One thing I’ve realized is a CIO today cannot simply be a technologist,” he says. “We must be a pathfinder, tracing a new path in an uncharted field, guided by experience from past technology shifts like the internet and the cloud. We must also be an evangelist and a C-suite advocate, championing the vision and securing the buy-in necessary for true transformation.”

Ausman’s approach is to focus on a few key priorities: centralizing governance, federating innovation, and measuring value. In addition, CIOs must be collaborators who bring together teams from HR, marketing, sales, engineering, and other business units, he says.

“The outcomes expected from CIOs cannot be created from IT alone,” he says. “Value creation requires people, process, and technology. The people and process transformation largely comes from within the teams of other C-suite leaders.”

At the same time, the CIO and IT organization need an equal seat at the table to help push broader teams through organizational transformations, he says. “That’s a shift that has been occurring for a few years but has been amplified with the focus on AI,” Ausman adds.

The new expectations for CIOs noted in the Deloitte report feel more fundamental than a few expanded responsibilities, says Jean-Philippe Avelange, CIO at managed networking and cloud provider Expereo.

In the past, CIOs were measured on systems delivered and IT uptime, but they’re now evaluated on how technology enables businesses to make different decisions, he says.

“What is changing is the unit of measure,” he says. “That repositions the role from running systems to shaping decisions, from cost center to capability builder. From where I sit, that direction is real, and it is happening regardless of how comfortable any one of us is with it.”

Building capable teams will be one of the hardest mandates for CIOs facing new expectations, and the issue goes beyond a training problem, he adds.

“It is keeping psychological safety intact while the pressure to deploy AI everywhere collides with a very legitimate fear of being replaced,” Avelange says. “Top-down adoption targets like ‘100% of engineers using AI by Q3’ tend to produce compliance gaming more than real outcomes.”

CIOs should focus more on augmenting jobs with AI instead of replacing employees with it, he recommends. IT leaders can improve AI outcomes by giving teams time to experiment, not just access to tools, and measuring velocity, quality, and decision speed instead of use rates, he adds.

“When this is done well, organizations often hire faster because each engineer becomes more valuable,” he says. “When it is not, adoption theater and a quietly cynical team are the more likely outcome.”